We're living in this weird asymmetry where companies use AI to talk to us, but we're still manually dialing them. Companies everywhere are adopting AI voice agents lately. Big retail, family dentist clinics, local pharmacy. This year, I've been in a few calls where it's super natural sounding AI, which has been pretty cool to experience. But then it got me thinking - why are we, the consumers, still the ones making calls if they're using robots for theirs?So I built Piper: basically AI that makes phone calls for you. You tell it what you need (book appointment, check on an order, dispute some charge, whatever), and it handles the entire conversation while you do actual work. Right now it's a web app, Chrome extension is pending approval but soon you'll be able to click any phone number anywhere and just let Piper handle it.Technical stuff that was harder than expected:Latency - every millisecond counts in conversation, had to optimize around kv cache, got it down to ~1000ms to first word over PSTN for telephony, which feels pretty naturalKeeping the voice agents on track - built custom context engineering logic that constantly updates the agent's situational awareness, so it knows when it's been transferred, when it's on hold, etcDone ~50 successful calls with early testers so far. Main failures are when they need complex verification or documents. Also had to take down our IVR navigation temporarily :/, found some edge cases that were causing unnecessary transfers but working on fixing that.I really think we're heading toward this world where AI talks to AI for most routine things, and phone calls might be the first real example of this happening at scale!you can check out the a voice demo on our website. https://pipervoice.comComments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44716414Points: 13# Comments: 2